The Fairest Bet On Super Bowl Sunday: The Coin Toss

• The Super Bowl is fast approaching and so are the weird prop bets that accompany it.
• Betting on the coin toss is an odd tradition for many sports bettors.
• The coin toss is perfectly even odds but sportsbooks, of course, take their cut.

MIAMI – While there may be smarter bets to be made on Super Bowl Sunday, the fairest one you can get is the Super Bowl coin toss. As always, many sportsbooks, both online and physical, will offer odds on the randomized choosing of who kicks off first.

Outside of the vig, these are pure odds, as both heads and tails are listed at -105. This is purely a game of luck, as obviously nobody knows the outcome of a coin flip before it happens.

In an industry focused on beating the books, the existence of a bet that is both pure chance and, due to the vig, losing value, is fascinating.

Perhaps sports bettors use it to psych themselves up, perhaps it’s simply an easy to comprehend prop bet, perhaps it is some other combination of factors, but the fact remains that betting on the Super Bowl coin toss continues to be a popular way to engage in legal gambling on Super Bowl Sunday.

Interestingly, winning the coin toss has shown little to no influence on actually winning the big game. Teams that have won the coin toss have a roughly 45.2% win rate in the Super Bowl, while teams that have lost the coin toss have won around 55.7% of the time.

In the overall historical tally, “Heads” is slightly behind, with 25 flips resulting in it, and 28 flips resulting in “Tails”. Of course, there is no insight to be gained from this other than that when you flip a coin a lot of times, the results will be 50/50 over a large enough sample size.

The fact that they are not perfectly even right now speaks to the relatively small sample size of 53 Super Bowl coin flips.

Each time the coin flips, there is a 50/50 chance, and taking into account the past times a coin has flipped will most likely not grant any sports bettors an edge.